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Wendell Cox is an international public policy
consultant. He is the principal and sole owner of Wendell Cox
Consultancy/Demographia, based in the St. Louis metropolitan
region and editor of three web sites, Demographia, The
Public Purpose and Urban Tours by Rental Car. Cox is
a fellow of numerous conservativethink tanks and a
frequent op-ed commenter in conservative US and UK newspapers.

Cox opposes prescriptive planning policies in the field of transportation and urban planning
(such as 'rationing' of land) which are popular with many
authorities worldwide. Instead, he favors responsive planning,
wherein the role of public planning is to facilitate the lifestyles
as revealed in household preferences (the market). He advocates
road transport and criticises what he feels is waste in many public
transport schemes, even those considered successful by their
proponents.[1][2]
He is an expert on rail
privatization.

Contents

Biographical

Cox was appointed to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation
Commission by Mayor Tom Bradley, and during his
1977 to 1985 service was the only member of the Commission not an
elected official. His amendment to the 1980 Proposition A transit
tax measure provided all of the local funding for Los Angeles urban
rail projects, including the Blue Line light rail and the Red Line
subway. Additional local funding was not obtained until a later
1990 referendum. Nonetheless, he has often opposed urban rail
systems because he claims that they have not reduced traffic
congestion, which he claims is the principal justification that has
been used for their construction.

He was appointed by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich to fill
the unexpired term of former New Jersey governor Christine Todd
Whitman on the Amtrak Reform Council, and served from 1999 until
the Council issued its final recommendations in 2002. He is vice
president of CODATU, an international organization dedicated to
improving urban transport in developing world urban areas. He is
also a member of the steering committee of the International
Conference on Competition and Ownership in Land Passenger
Transport, which will hold its 10th conference in Australia in 2007.

Cox is a visiting fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation, a senior fellow at the
conservative-oriented Heartland
Institute, senior fellow for urban policy at the libertarian
Independence Institute (Denver) and holds similar titles in a
number of additional conservative think tanks.

Urban
planning

Cox has also emerged as an opponent of smart growth, especially urban growth
boundaries, impact fees, and large lot zoning, claiming they have a
tendency to raise housing prices artificially and suppress economic
growth. Wendell Cox, as paid consultant, has authored studies for the American Highway Users
Alliance, a group that lobbies for more highways. He has been
employed by various conservative and road building groups over the
years.[3]

He has also criticized land use policies in the Portland,
Oregon area, noting that the area expanded its urban
growth boundary to its intended 2040 area 38 years early due to
political pressure.

Demographia publishes the 'Demographia International Housing
Affordability Ratings' and Rankings early each year.[4] The
survey has been criticised. [5]

Urban
transport

Cox believes that the goal of public transportation systems
should be to provide mobility to those who do not have access to a
car, and not to reduce traffic congestion.[6] As such
he believes agencies should seek to obtain maximum value for every
dollar of taxes and fees expended, using whatever transportation
choices maximize ridership. He believes competitive approaches
(principally competitive contracting and competitive tendering) are
most effective in this regard.

Cox's transport site "The Public Purpose" claims it is not
opposed to urban rail, though many of Cox's opponents would
strongly disagree. It instead argues that it is opposed to waste.
The site claims that it would cost less to lease every new
light-rail rider a luxury car than to build light-rail projects
themselves; this has entered the planning lexicon as the "Jaguar Argument." He has suggested a
correlation between personal mobility and income. He calls public
transportation a welfare service that does a
"good job of getting people downtown and serving the low-income
poor moving around the core, but
it can't do any more than that." In response, representatives of
the Sierra Club have
called Wendell Cox an "itinerant anti-public transportation
gun-for-hire."[2]

His more recent transport activities oppose the claim that road
congestion reduction is obtained from improving urban mass transit.
Among other things, he claims his aim is to improve urban mobility
through performance programs that obtain the greatest reduction in
travel-delay hours for the public funding available. Cox claims to
be "'pro-choice' with respect to urban
development", asserting that "people should be allowed to live
and work where they like," consistent with the Lone Mountain Compact, of which he was a
signatory.